Often referred to as the first Romanian found footage film, Be My Cat throws us into a rabbit hole of self-reflexivity and madness
The title of this film is Be My Cat: A Film for Anne. The working title of the in-progress film within the film is simply Be My Cat. The name of the film within the film within the film is, well, unknown, but probably something to do with the main character’s mutant ailurophilia. Supposedly edited down from a trove of footage found at a crime scene in Romania, Adrian Țofei’s no-budget first-person oddity is a rabbit hole of self-reflexivity. It is the Being John Malkovich of found footage horror, a dense, high-concept, discombobulating ouroboros with a taste for the absurd and a disorienting fixation on a Hollywood star as a vessel for a very specific strain of madness and disaffection.
The real-life actor at the center of this maze is Anne Hathaway — but not the real Anne Hathaway, the idea of Anne Hathaway. A very particular version of Anne Hathaway: the Anne Hathaway who portrayed Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, in the least loved installment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. Romanian writer-director-actor-editor-producer-cinematographer-etc. Adrian Țofei’s Be My Cat is about an aspiring multi-hyphenate filmmaker, also named Adrian, who lives in Romania and desperately desires to realize his dream project: an intimate collaboration with his muse, one Anne Hathaway. Adrian intends to display his extreme commitment to his art to the woman he admires and desires through an epic video pitch that doubles as a proof of concept for Be My Cat, his unprecedented horror-drama film. The title of the movie and the subject line of the pitch are one and the same. Just to say, Anne Hathaway has never made a horror film.
Fictional Adrian’s project is also about an aspiring filmmaker. It sounds a little like a deranged remake of Cat People. But things get murky the deeper we go into this nesting doll; at this third level of psychological spelunking, the separation between film project and deep-seated neuroses dissolves. Adrian is absolutely responding to The Dark Knight Rises through the prism of his deepest, darkest fetishes, laundered through artistic admiration. His kinks and his rage are simultaneously awakened by Hathaway’s “loveable catsuit.” Fictional Adrian’s fictional Adrian “loves girls and cats;” this much we know. He’s obsessed with cats and actresses and he wants to resurrect the cat that he strangled when he was a child. This cat will return in the form of a woman; it will inhabit the body of a beautiful actress who has proven herself worthy. This long-deceased cat will become Anne Hathaway.
As if this weren’t all impenetrable enough, fictional Adrian is also simultaneously filming B-roll for the inevitable making-of documentary, for the Be My Cat completists, yet another psychological cul-de-sac in this already spiraling project. But, beyond these tangible striations, there’s another, deeper layer here, a metaphysical transformation that is the core of Adrian’s conceptual art, which can only be achieved through the artistic union with Anne. By completing this project together, he tells us in one of his discursive monologues, they will both be “transformed psychologically, emotionally, even physically,” thus becoming different people entirely. By sacrificing their egos, their souls will be released. What exactly this means is anyone’s guess.
Riffing on the idea that this region of Europe is a hotbed for extreme violence, Be My Cat is a parodic exercise in Eastern Blocsploitation. Adrian’s convoluted plan to lure Anne Hathaway to this small town in Romania, the village of Rădăuți, requires a dry run. He hires three amateur Romanian actresses for the Be My Cat proof of concept shoot: Flory (Florentina Hariton, a friend of Țofei’s from college), Sonya (Sonia Teodoriu), and Alexandra (Alexandra Stroe). This long-form video love letter to Hathaway is also a dress rehearsal for Be My Cat, mixing his lusty overtures with philosophical musings, acting exercises, and elliptical scene studies. Why he has to kill these women is not entirely clear.
The different personalities of the actresses bring out different sides of Adrian and various shades of his misogyny. The interactions inevitably turn dark, then threatening, then violent. Sonya arrives first and screen tests alone. She is standoffish at first then turned off by Adrian’s increasingly antagonistic and condescending approach. Adrian is able to spin their cat-and-mouse dynamic in his favor and convinces her to perform a scene where she is captured at night on the street. He chloroforms her (for real), brings her back to his rented pink room, ties her down, undresses her, then puts her in a black leotard. When she comes to, he savors her panic then strangles her to death, filming it all while playing demure for Anne. “It wasn’t that hard,” he mutters to himself, or to Anne, or maybe both.
Flory arrives next and he repeats the same pattern with her, trying to belittle her with roadside acting drills. But, rather than shutting down and pulling away, she gives it back to him. She sees through the façade, questioning not only the value of these lessons but also, blasphemously, the acting skills of Anne Hathaway. She even acknowledges the sexual undertones of this whole setup, which she’s not exactly opposed to. He responds by focusing on her appearance, insulting her repeatedly, and saying that she misrepresented herself. The third and final actress, Alexandra, arrives with Flory still there. The shoot moves indoors, to the basement of the apartment building. For the first scene, Adrian convinces Flory to remove her clothes and be tied to a bed frame. With Alexandra gone, he cuts into Flory’s abdomen and she bleeds out. It’s telling that this second death is the most gruesome, with blood splattered on a carefully arranged sheet and Adrian taking some measure of sadistic, extracurricular pleasure in her agony.
Alexandra’s segment takes a turn. She discovers Flory’s dead body and the reality of her situation dawns on her. As she flees, Adrian returns. But she takes a different tactic and leans into his need for control and dominance. She plays coy, appealing to his vanity and his ego, and fueling his desire for Anne Hathaway. Whether her gambit worked is open for interpretation as the film ends on a strangely joyous, ambiguous note, a breakthrough for Adrian: he now sees the object of his desire in a new light, as “a real person.” He is finally able to admit to himself that he loves Anne Hathaway and that he must overcome his crippling agoraphobia to go to her. He counts down to the end of the final scene, giving Alexandra license to script the last line: “Love.”
Be My Cat is very much a black comedy about our collective obsession with the auteur, this idea of the visionary filmmaker, typically male, who bends reality, and a cast and crew, to his will by the sheer force of his personality and artistry. Be My Cat plays out toxic on-set power dynamics to the extreme: the megalomaniacal director as a literal psychopath. The eye of the camera and the eye of the killer are often one and the same. From this first-person vantage, Adrian’s hands, distorted and over-sized, aggressively, threateningly jut into the frame, sometimes grasping a knife. Adrian is a chillingly believable human monster but also a strangely compelling antagonist. Giddy and talkative, he’s almost disarmingly naive, until he’s not. The nonprofessional, off-the-cuff shooting style and undisciplined compositions make for an absurd counterpoint to his rarified artiste posturing.
Adrian’s instructions as a captor who has cornered his victim and his directions as a filmmaker are basically inextricable. These actresses are interchangeable, literally expendable commodities, meant to be molded then discarded. The Final Girl archetype is multiplied and examined through a series of iterations. When Alexandra briefly takes control of the camera in the final act, the symbolic victory is significant; she hijacks the proceedings and ruptures the very fabric of the film. She opens a new corridor in this complex hall of mirrors and the negotiation for her life becomes a warped act of artistic collaboration.
Filmmaking proves to be a powerful shield for psychopathy. Adrian is upfront that he’s luring these actresses into a dead-end opportunity, but they are still eager participants. These desperate creatives willingly fall prey and sink deeper into his clutches. Many scenes are filmed out in the open, in broad daylight, as cars pass by; no one stops to check on the young women being harassed by a suspicious creep. The camera in his hand is more than enough to keep bystanders at bay. When they move indoors, the same logic applies: All the tenants in the building have been informed that they are filming a movie, a horror movie, so they expect to hear screaming. Two concerned neighbors do show up as Flory bleeds out, but they are easily turned away. Sonya even calls the police (an unscripted choice by Sonia Teodoriu), but the authorities are satisfied with Adrian’s explanation.
Adrian is even able to convince himself that his most vile actions and disturbing impulses are excusable, an extension of his creative process. The violence he commits is simply done in character. The mental gymnastics — remorseless compartmentalization, projection, and denial — make Be My Cat psychologically kaleidoscopic. When he undresses an unconscious Sonya in the pink bedroom, he assures Anne that he would never do this; this is “Adrian” assaulting this woman, not Adrian. Of course, if you are looking straight into the camera to say, “I’m still in character,” you’ve already broken character. This irony is completely lost on Adrian and “Adrian,” but hopefully not our Adrian.
The conditions of the actual making of Be My Cat are not all that different from the farcical amateurism of the Be My Cat shoot that we see. Țofei scraped together all he could to make the film, shooting on a threadbare shoestring, with a measly Canon Legria HF G25 camcorder and its internal microphones. He had no prior filmmaking experience and no crew. When fictional Adrian shows us around the small home he shares with his mother, that’s real Adrian’s mother, too — art imitating life too close for comfort, with an awkward Psycho joke thrown in for good measure. Țofei himself is an artist inclined to compose manifestos; he wrote one on found footage specifically. And indeed Be My Cat is often referred to as the first Romanian found footage film.
Many of fictional Adrian’s most out-there monologues are mainlined from the acting pedagogy of Ion Cojar, a major influence on Țofei, who insisted that performers and filmmakers should create the circumstances in which the “truth of life” can occur. Under these conditions, he believed, one can experience authentic psychologically realistic processes by which one is actually changed as a person. Țofei’s actress-obsessed director character emerged as a monologue in acting school, which he later developed into a successful one-man show called Monster, about a man with some unspecified issues with cats. To more fully embody his reclusive, agoraphobic alter ego, he moved back into his childhood home in rural Romania. Living in character, he isolated himself for almost a year, rarely leaving the house. He posted online ads for actresses and launched crowdfunding campaigns to purchase the camera and laptop for editing. Adrian met the actors in person for the first time on camera and in character. Although he shot 25 hours of footage (a piece of trivia that is also part of the found footage lore within the movie), only first takes made the final cut.
Be My Cat is an unusual entry in the lineage of films about fanaticism and celebrity obsession. It’s also part of a canon of films, mostly comedies, about misbegotten filmmakers and artists: American Movie, Waiting for Guffman, David Holzman’s Diary, Burden of Dreams, Ed Wood, The Last Horror Film, Man Bites Dog, Borat, et al. Țofei began constructing the fictional world of Be My Cat over many years, with months of intensive preparation once the project came to fruition, laying the groundwork for what he calls a “self-sustained fictional reality” — a truly Kaufmanesque turn of phrase straight out of the Synecdoche, New York playbook. But the dense philosophy stirring under the surface of Be My Cat, and the gritty authenticity of the film, also marks it as an unsung entry in the Romanian New Wave, alongside celebrated contemporaries Corneliu Porumboiu, Cristian Mungiu, and Cristi Puiu.
Be My Cat is a passion project that doubles (triples? quadruples?) as a reflection of the abnormal motivations that fed its own making. It’s a movie that requires a linguistic safety system — speaking English equals “in character;” speaking Romanian equals “out of character” — to maintain a tether to reality for those involved. It’s also the first chapter in a planned trilogy that includes upcoming films We Put the World to Sleep (in post-production) and Pure, both created in collaboration with Țofei’s partner Duru Yücel. Adrian has continued to indulge his obsessive personality as he digs deeper into this proposed trilogy; We Put the World to Sleep was shot over five years across 13 locations and is currently being culled and shaped from 150 hours of footage as Țofei scrapes together funding.
It’s unavoidable, too, that Țofei is kind of exploiting the novelty of putting a phantom Anne Hathaway front and center in his film world. Ultimately, Be My Cat speaks to the near-universal cinephilia in us all, where we seek fulfillment in the media we love and the celebrities we identify with, even ironically. What this says specifically about the person writing thousands of words about the infinite regress of this semi-obscure found footage film is an open question. When the film descends into unnerving passages of direct address, Adrian unwittingly spotlights our complicity in his toxic fandom. Sometimes, he even seems to expect an answer back. Adrian’s unbridled enthusiasm is almost relatable if it weren’t surrounded by total darkness. If Be My Cat is a movie made for an audience of one, then in the mise-en-abyme of Be My Cat: A Film for Anne, we are all Anne Hathaway.
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